Netflix is filling out the cast around lead Sandra Oh in its dramedy The Chair.
Nana Mensah, Bob Balaban, David Morse and Everly Carganilla will be regulars in the six-episode series set at a small university. Ji Yong Lee, Mallory Low, Marcia DeBonis, Ron Crawford, Ella Rubin and Bob Stephenson will have guest roles.
They join a cast that includes Oh — who plays the title character, the chair of the school’s English department — Jay Duplass and Holland Taylor.
The Chair was created by Amanda Peet and Annie Julia Wyman, who co-wrote the pilot. Peet (Dirty John, Togetherness) will serve as showrunner, and Game of Thrones creators David Benioff (Peet’s husband) and D.B. Weiss are among the executive producers. The series was the first to be greenlit under a massive overall deal Benioff and Weiss signed with the streamer in 2019 (they’re also adapting author Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem with The Terror: Infamy‘s Alexander Woo).
Mensah (New Amsterdam) will play Yasmin “Yaz” McKay, a popular professor and close colleague of Oh’s Ji-Yoon. Balaban (The Politician) plays Elliot Mentz, a distinguished but set in his ways professor. Morse (Escape at Dannemora) will play the school’s dean, Paul Larson, and Carganilla (Netflix’s Yes Day) plays Ji-Yoon’s daughter, Ju-Hee “Ju Ju” Kim.
Peet, Benioff, Weiss and Oh executive produce The Chair with Bernie Caulfield and director Daniel Gray Longino (Pen15, Who Is America?). The show is in production in Pittsburgh.
Morse is repped by Kipperman Management, UTA and Katz, Golden & Rosenman LLP. Rubin is with Kipperman Management and Paradigm.
